Earlier this week, in an effort to crack down on protests, Egypt cut off access to Twitter, Facebook and, at one point, Google. Now, it seems the country has decided to completely ‘switch off’ the Internet by asking services providers to shut down all international connections to the Web.
Renesys reports that though critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now, Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are off the air.
“At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table,” writes James Cowie.
“Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers,” he continued, adding, “Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.”
The only company with a working connection is Noor Group. Renesys says it still has 83 out of 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, and notes that the Egyption Stock Exchange is at a Noor address.
